A conference call is a telephone call in which the calling party wishes to have one or more additional parties involved. It allows people in different geographic locations to “meet” at a prearranged time via telephone. In the business world, conference calling can be vital to the business's success, as it can greatly facilitate business communications. A primary benefit of conference calling is that it can save time and money. Employees who may be scattered throughout the country do not have to be in the same place to exchange information or ideas. This also results in savings to the business in travel expenses, such as air transportation or gas mileage as well as hotel costs and meal expenses.
Conference call participant are typically able to call in to the conference call by dialing a telephone number that connects to a conference bridge, which is a central server or type of equipment that links telephone lines and maintains the various communication paths to client devices being used by parties to participate in the conference. Businesses commonly use a specialized service provider who maintains the conference bridge, or who provides the phone numbers and passwords that participants dial to access the meeting or conference call. Often, especially in large corporations, a person may have multiple conference call meetings scheduled for a single day, with a high potential of having sequentially scheduled (or back to back) calls in each day. As with in-person meetings, conference calls may run over an allotted amount of time, causing problems for the person with the sequentially scheduled calls and for other participants joining any of the scheduled conference calls.